5 Responses to The Miller-Urey Experiment — The Gift That Keeps Giving

My personal take on this is that Miller-Urey is relevant to a wider but less scientific audience, but it’s hardly cutting edge and not really representative of the state of current origins research. I hope more recent work is referenced also, if so sign me up for a copy.

Personally I believe that research into OOL should be enthusiatically encouraged by both ID and non-ID thinkers as whatever is discovered won’t decisively prove the case either way, but whatever is (if anything ever is) discovered potentially sheds light on how the intelligent desigher might have done it. Or not – depending on what view you hold, but better to have the information then not.

Dr Dembski, when you say this book is “about the orign of life” will you be actually revealing the origin of life?

Stelios, I’m sure Dr. Dembski will not be revealing a new theory of naturalistic abiogenesis that could actually work as you desire. The fact that you have to ask the question, reveals your bias. You are not interested in any answer that Dr. Dembski will likely give.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the modern significance of the Miller-Urey experiment was simply that it showed that biochemicals could be produced by environmental factors. Not unlike the importance of the synthesis of urea.

Does anybody really think that Miller’s simulated environmental conditions actually resembled those of early earth anymore? There have been numerous experiments that corroborate Miller-Urey (with more accurate environmental conditions) since then. But I suppose the book will be discussing those too.

Miller presumed that the earth’s primordial atmosphere was reducing (that is, it contained the smallest amount of free (chemically uncombined) oxygen. However, in a paper he authored two years after his experiment, Miller readily admitted that “no direct evidence has yet been found” to substantiate this (“Journal of the American Chemical Society, 5/12/55).

Some 40 years later, Miller admitted that the problem of the origin of life was “much more diffcult” than he had originally envisioned.

From my perspective, if intelligence and advanced education are required to begin to explain what occurs at the molecular level in human cells, then it is not reasonable to believe that such complicated steps occurred first in some “prebiotic soup” undirected, spontaneously, and by chance. Life is too complicated to arise in an organized laboratory, let alone an uncontrolled environment.